It’s the birthday of Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), often hailed as one of the greatest woman Victorian poets—they used to divide poets into man poets and woman poets—but more frequently hailed today as one of the great Victorian poets, period.

(Back in the man poet/woman poet days, it used to be a thing to argue over whether Rossetti or Elizabeth Barrett Browning were the greater woman poet. Something to talk about this holiday season when you want a little controversy but are sick of politics.)

Rossetti was born in London, the youngest of four children of the Italian poet Gabriele Rossetti and his Italian-English wife Frances Polidori. Gabriele was also a Dante scholar and became chair of Italian at King’s College; Frances was a trained governess and taught the children at home, although eventually the two boys went off to school because boys. Rossetti had a very happy childhood, and all four children went on to do Great Things: brother Dante Gabriel was an artist and poet, brother William Michael was a writer and critic, and sister Maria authored a well-respected study of Dante. (How many well-respected studies of Dante has your sister authored? Yes. I thought so.)

In 1843, Rossetti’s father’s health tanked and he could no longer work, so the family finances tanked as well. Frances, William, and Maria all went to work, Dante Gabriel kept studying, and Rossetti herself, about 14, stayed home to care for her father. In 1845, Rossetti’s health tanked as well, though no one seems to know why. Theories abound, from psychosomatic illness to sexual trauma to religious mania. (Some of the Rossettis were very High Church Anglican. Maria was so High she became an Anglican nun.) But in 1847, Rossetti’s first collection of poems, Verses, was privately published by her grandfather and showed the literary influences of the likes of Radcliffe, Herbert, Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson, and Dante. (Dante Alighieri, or the Dante. I’m sorry. Too many Dantes. Too many Gabriel(e)s.)

Rossetti was about 31 when her most famous collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems, was published, followed four years later by The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems; these two collections made her reputation, and she’s also highly regarded for her children’s book, Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872). (In the meantime, she’d also rejected two suitors who were too Catholic and not High Anglican enough.) In 1871, Rossetti began to struggle with Graves’ disease; she began writing mostly religious works, including Time Flies: A Reading Diary (1885). Rossetti developed breast cancer in 1891 and had a mastectomy in her own home. After her death, William Michael published more of her work. The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti came out in three volumes between 1979 and 1985.

Rossetti’s poem “Echo” begins:

Come to me in the silence of the night;

Come in a speaking silence of a dream;

Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright

As sunlight on a stream;

Come back in tears,

O memory, hope, love of finished years…

(Read the rest here.)

Have a beautiful snow-falling-silently sort of Thursday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.